The Middle Stage

Monday, October 06, 2014

The words "modern India" are used today to describe a vast nation-state of over a billion people, but they also imply a particular trajectory of history. They refer to an ancient, ethnically and culturally diverse civilization that was colonized from the eighteenth century onwards, that developed a native intelligentsia that eventually deployed against British colonialism ideas of nationhood and liberty adapted from thought currents in the West, and that in 1947 won independence and became a nation-state ambitiously committed to democracy and secularism.

But if much has been gained by the ascent, over three centuries, of modern political ideals and global thought-systems in India, much, too, about the precolonial Indian past has become obscure, or entirely fallen away from view. In the new beginnings either forced upon the country in recent centuries or else self-consciously fashioned at home, these older knowledge-systems seem to have no place. To put it another way, in the twenty-first century's speeded-up time and vast platter of choices, the past seems to have become shorter. What might we do to prevent ourselves from completely becoming the prisoners of our own categories of time and place?

The Indian intellectual DR Nagaraj, a dazzling and eclectic thinker who taught briefly in America at the University of Chicago in the nineties before he died tragically young at the age of 44, is best-known forhis book of essays on Mahatma Gandhi and BR Ambedkar, two intellectual titans of the Indian twentieth century who often took opposing positions on the great issues of their day, such as the caste system and untouchability. But Nagaraj was also possessed by a desire not just to see the Indian past through the lenses of the present, but also to turn history around and inspect the present through the lenses of the past. “If the methods and philosophical positions of present times are fit and useful to analyse the formulations of several kinds of pre-modern eras, the reverse should also be true,” he writes. Genuinely bilingual -- he wrote in both Kannada, one of the major languages of the Indian south, and in English -- he possessed the resources to carry this project through. Many of Nagaraj's ideas about how the dozens of distant Indian pasts could be brought to bear productively upon the present have just become available in a posthumously published book of essays, put together by his friends, colleagues, and students, called Listening To The Loom.

Although the book is often difficult going, reading it is like being taken on a whirlwind tour of Indian intellectual history, the kind of journey that nobody seriously interested in India should deny himself. I stayed up late into the night with it for several days, stimulated by sense a contact with a mind that seemed to be living in several centuries at the same time. The effect of reading Nagaraj has been described very well by the Indian historian Ananja Vajpeyi, who was briefly his student at Chicago:

DR could teach us about Gandhi, Ambedkar and Nehru, in many ways India’s archetypal modernists, all the while speaking in a style that suggested that even today, the Buddha was delivering sermons in Sarnath, and the classical doctrines of Nayyayikasand Buddhists, Mimansakas and Advaitins, Carvakas and Jainas, Sufis and Sikhs, were creating the pleasant hum and hubbub of an Indic intellectual world. My hunch is that DR identified, in a personal way, with the protagonists he constantly returned to: the Buddha, who walked away from worldly attachments, only to find it supremely difficult to actually detach himself; Nagarjuna, a Brahmin who turned Buddhist, the South Indian from Andhra whose texts brought Buddhism to Tibet and China; Ambedkar, the modernist obsessed with premodernity; Gandhi, who had to wrestle as hard with his own indefatigable appetites as he did with the mighty British Empire.

Nagaraj’s painstaking and perceptive editor, Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi, who's tenured at San Francisco State University, compares him to that of the ancient Indian pauranika: “the storyteller who organises the knowledge and wisdom of a culture,” and guards against the slide into intellectual amnesia. But what exactly did Nagaraj think Indians were losing sight of?

For Nagaraj, as for several other prominent modern Indian thinkers working in different modes (whether Jawaharlal Nehru in his book The Discovery of India, or the framers of the Indian constitution) the first fact of Indian history was its pluralism, its diversity of viewpoints and knowledge systems – some exceedingly arcane, but nevertheless philosophically rigorous and linguistically rich – humming in dialogue or tension with one another. This history meant that no one religion, ethnic group, or languagecould enjoy a specially privileged place in the new Indian nation.

But at the same time, the modern nation-state, with its vast hunger for centralization and homogenization, invariably tilts towards a public sphere composed of majorities and minorities, insiders and outsiders, us and them – or what Nagaraj calls “identity narratives of the religious-nationalist kind”. Almost every nation-state that has emerged from the shadow of colonialism continues to wrestle with this problem.
This majoritarian tendency is seen in modern India in the right-wing Hindu project that wishes to pummel Hinduism into a unified field and to represent minorities (Muslims, tribals, agitating lower-caste groups) as misguided, unpatriotic, or aberrant. (Both aspects of this tendency can be found in a rant by the Indian politician Subramanian Swamy last year.) Nagaraj’s brief, tenchant critique of the Hindu right-wing movement’s use of the figure of Rama – the hero of the ancient Indian epic the Ramayana – as a symbol for its political aspirations will have to serve here as a representative instance of his own method. The movement reached its apotheosis in 1992, when Hindu agitators destroyed a mosque, the Babri Masjid, in the north Indian town of Ayodhya, since the site was considered the birthplace of the historical Rama. (An excellent eyewitness account of the sacking of the Babri Masjid and a meditation on its fallout in Indian life can be found in the Australian foreign correspondent Christopher Kremmer's book Inhaling The Mahatma.)
But this fixing of Rama in both history and geography, argues Nagaraj, elides the hundreds of other “sightings” of Ram and the other major protagonists of the Ramayana reported in legends from all across India and not only the north. The power of Rama in Indian history, as expressed in its art and its legends, was that he was not “there”, speaking from remote Ayodhya, but always “here”, somewhere close to home. (Diana Eck’s magisterial recent book India: A Sacred Geography illuminates Hinduism’s persistent instinct for duplication of global stories in local contexts).

But with Hindu nationalism, says Nagaraj, “history and faith are being made to share the same bed” -- somewhat like with creationism in America. What might be an antidote to such divisive readings of the Ramayana? For Nagaraj, the answer lay in not just a scolding based on the ideals of the Indian constitution (a point of view which sounds patronising to many right-wing Hindus), but a turn instead of the many “folk” Ramayanas of India, which often poke fun at the central characters of the epic, and see their stories as aesthetically malleable structures to be continuously reinterpreted, not set down in stone. For Nagaraj, “the recovery of difference is an effective way of overcoming those threats posed by the essentialist use of symbols.” The pluralism of the Indian constitution might be seen as just the codification, in the modern language of rights, secularism, and democracy, of the natural pluralism of Indian history.

In a tribute to Nagaraj shortly after his death, the scholars Sheldon Pollock and Carol Appadurai Breckinbridge offered an assessment not just of the range of Nagaraj's intellectual gifts but also of the diverse, and sometimes disquieting, life experiences he brought to his work. Just as Charles Dickens as a boy had done time in a blacking factory, so too Nagaraj, born in a notionally free India, had as a boy spent some time weaving in bonded labour. Pollock and Breckinbridge wrote:

When D. R. became a visiting professor at the University of Chicago in 1996, he had gained a reputation as one of the leading cultural critics in India, and perhaps the foremost thinker of the politics of cultural choice among those he would refer to as historically humiliated communities, including dalits (those formerly called untouchables) and artisanal castes known as shudras. If this were all D. R. had to give, it would have been gift enough. But D. R. approached the problem of subaltern cultural choice from a perspective broadened not only by familiarity with contemporary metropolitan thought but also by profound study of the living cultures of rural India and of the precolonial past. It was especially in that past -- the fact that so many South Asian intellectuals no longer had access to it was for D. R. an enduring catastrophe of colonialism -- that he found important resources to recover and theorize. And he did this in a spirit neither of antiquarianism nor indigenism. D. R. understood that social and political justice cannot be secured without reasoned critique, and that the instruments of critique in postcolonial India had to be forged anew from an alloy that included precolonial Indian thought and culture -- but only after being subjected themselves to critical inspection. In exploring these resources he showed the remarkable intellectual reach and curiosity that enabled him to speak across every disciplinary boundary and to explore an astonishing range of conceptual and ethical possibilities.

To put it another way, while many prominent modern Indian thinkers have sought to expand Indian pluralism from above, in dialogue with ideas from the West, Nagaraj sought to expand Indian pluralism from below by sifting through the best of India's native traditions and recovering their vocabulary and concepts. The Clay Sanskrit Library (now the Murty Classical Library), an ambitious new Indic publishing project aiming "to make available the great literary works of India from the past two millennia in scholarly yet accessible translations", would have excited Nagaraj greatly as just the kind of gateway to the past that he tried to supply in his essays. One of the things that we most closely associate with the condition of being modern is the range of choices guaranteed to us in relationships, vocations, consumer goods. Through a book like *Listening To The Loom*, we see that what we are given as moderns is also an unprecedented ability to transcend our historical moment and inhabit the pasts from which our world has emerged.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

The short-story writer Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) deserves to be thought of as the patron saint of modern South Asian fiction for at least three reasons.

First, Manto was personally and artistically impacted, in a way that he transformed into enduring narrative prose, by the massive cataclysm of history that was the partition of colonial India in 1947 into two nation states, the Hindu-majority India and the Muslim-majority Pakistan. The decision sparked off the largest two-way migration in history, with millions of Hindus and Sikhs in what was suddenly Pakistan crossing into India and millions of Muslims in what was now a smaller India attempting to flee to Pakistan. Both sides leapt at each other’s throats on the long, strife-torn route, generating a bloodbath – and more lastingly, memories that were passed down for generations afterwards – that may take hundreds of years to heal.

This event generated the enduring politics of distrust between the two great powers of the subcontinent, which between them account for more than a quarter of the world’s population today. What Manto wrote then in the light of what he had known, heard or witnessed – and what he did with this material artistically, within the four walls of his own independence as a writer of fiction – make him an eerie and thrilling writer to this day.

Second, Manto’s daring and iconoclastic writing served as a kind of declaration of independence from the main narrative tenets and orthodoxies of his times, which was that fiction should be “socially relevant” in its content, that it locate the personal within the larger realm of the public sphere, and that it deal coyly and euphemistically – or at best metaphorically – with the subject of bodily functions. Manto was in his lifetime repeatedly charged by his critics (many of them writers themselves) with obscenity, and was even taken to court for what was seen as the outrageous licentiousness depicted in his work.

But what his critics saw as a determined emphasis on the bawdy,Manto merely understood to be a determined emphasis on the body – as a site for pleasure and violence, trust and treachery, a house for yearnings of mind and spirit as well as its own longings. The world of the prostitutes, pimps, waifs, wastrels and debauchees that he wrote about in story after story was a universe that existed in reality – as much a centre of Bombay (now Mumbai) as the film world or the world of polite society – and was stratified and impacted by religion, politics, ideology, migration and economics as interestingly as any middle-class or radical world.

The current of defiance embodied by Manto is one of literature’s most necessary currents; its spirit was given voice by the French-Arabic writer Tahar Ben Jelloun at the Jaipur Literature Festival earlier this year when he remarked, bitingly, of censorship, “What bothers censorship is the representation of reality and not reality itself.” To Manto, the writer must think through every sphere of human life, including one’s private life. If he is the frankest sensualist in Indian literature, it is because he knows (as did the 18th-century Italian adventurer Giacomo Casanova in his magnificent 12-volume autobiography The Story of My Life) that sensuality is not without its own rules or ethical codes. For this reason, he speaks as powerfully to the 21st century as he did to his own.

Third, Manto stands implicitly for a certain progressive ideal of civilisation – and then, just as instructively, for a tragic rejection of that very ideal. Although partition found him living on in his beloved city of Bombay (where he had made a living and forged a reputation working as a screenwriter in films and an editor for journals), Manto felt insecure in the city in the poisoned years after partition and suddenly decided – to his everlasting regret – to move with his family to the new state of Pakistan. There, he struggled to find work, was prosecuted for obscenity, and drove himself to drink. He became a wreck, passing away soon after.
What makes Manto so readable, and so symbolic of the faultlines of his time, is this artistic partition that he went through a few years after the actual historical event by the same name.Manto discovers that the ideological certitude and censoriousness of a new nation-state was thin gruel compared to art’s invitation to freedom, doubt, linguistic and sensual pleasure, and dissent. He discovers, that is, what he already knew, and submits to suffering as he once thrilled to freedom.

In Manto’s own biography, as much as in his stories, the human being is a whirlpool of conflicting impulses, often most deluded precisely when most sure of himself. Human beings also appear constricted or enabled not just by nature (their class, or gender) but also by culture – in the world of Manto’s stories, by the tangled history, cosmopolitan culture, and worldly, laissez-faire philosophy of Bombay, so infrequently seen in the history of the subcontinent and so valuable for precisely that reason. It is a superficial criticism of Manto’s stories to see them as titillating tableaux of the whims and deceits of pimps and bawds. What we are also supposed to see is the social energy, toppled hierarchies, polyglot tongues, fantastic metaphors, and moral reverses and sacrifices of this universe.

That is why it is surprising to note that none of Manto’s many previous translators have done what Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmed do in their new collection of Manto translations, and titled their collection Bombay Stories. Bombay is not just the place where Manto's stories are set but that world’s primal word, the two syllables of which generate all else in the geographical and narrative field it encompasses. Colloquial and frank where too many previous translations of Manto have been euphemistic and censorious, Reeck and Ahmed give us a Manto who walks with us in time, instead of receding from us in the vehicle of the archaic English and slightly appalled, sanitizing gaze of many South Asian translators.

“If you haven’t been to Bombay, you might not believe that no one takes any interest in anyone else,” writes the narrator in Manto’s story "Mammad Bhai". (Bhai, literally brother, is used frequently in India and Pakistan as an honorific; many of Manto’s stories are named after their protagonists.) But it is just not the sights and sounds and moral universe and freedoms of Bombay that are common to Manto’s stories, but also a narrator. Almost without exception, the stories are told by a character who shares much of the real Manto’s biography and is referred to by the characters in the stories as “Manto saab” (Mr Manto).

The more we see this figure, the more mysterious he becomes, particularly since he keeps watching men fall in love with women without ever falling into the net himself. When at one point he confesses to a great admiration for a certain woman’s beauty and intelligence, he protests immediately, “For God’s sake, please don’t think I was enamoured!” It is as if his men and women can get together only when Manto saab agrees to keep watch.

Love in Manto may sometimes be transcendent. But it is always physical. “‘Love.’ What a beautiful word!” the prostitute Saugandhi is shown thinking in a story called "The Insult". “She wanted to smear it all over her body and massage it into her pores.” Here Manto, in a characteristically ingenious invention, makes love not something that emanates from the heart and soul and irradiates the body, but something like a salve or balm that is rubbed into the body from without. Manto’s romance is often deliberately anti-romantic – one woman, the Jewish girl Mozelle, carelessly smears on lipstick in such a way that her lips “seemed as fat and as red as chunks of buffalo meat”.

Over and over again in Manto’s stories, as in the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, men and women come face in face in private and confront one another with their dreams and pickings, their histories of guilt and pain. Readers of these stories who know Bombay today as Mumbai might find the city’s spirit somewhat impoverished in comparision to the mid-century Bombay that Manto describes. But that world lives on forever in Manto’s stories, and in these new translations by Reeck and Ahmed,Manto is himself reborn as our contemporary.

Monday, February 04, 2013

Here is an essay I wrote recently for a special Indian fiction issue of the Italian magazine Internazionale, produced in collaboration with The Caravan, in the last week of December 2012. I wrote it in my capacity as the Fiction & Poetry editor of The Caravan, and I attempt to introduce some currents in Indian fiction today and explain why The Caravan publishes fiction every month when it's primarily a magazine of narrative non-fiction. I've also made short notes on the stories in the issue (some of which were earlier published in English in The Caravan) -- literary-critical notes for the most part, and autobiographical in the case of my own story "Captain To The Poles". I chose in the main to leave out stories in Indian languages other than English because of the practical and methodological difficulties inherent in translating an English translation into another language.

The Caravan of India is a monthly English magazine
of politics and the arts that specializes in long-form narrative journalism –
in the work of fruitfully complicating facts and opinions that circulate in the
public sphere, and generating detailed profiles of the men and women who
exercise power in India, not always wisely. Every issue of the magazine
contains six to eight pieces of reportage from five to fifteen thousand words long.

But of
course, it is not just journalism that probes the secret vortexes of the world.
So does fiction, by techniques and juxtapositions native to its realm, through the
attention and craftsmanship of a bright individual sensibility that seeks to
prove nothing, but generates sparks of meaning at every turn. Every month, the
magazine publishes a short story by an Indian writer, young or old, classic or
unknown, in English or in translation from one of India’s twenty or so other
major languages, from Hindi in the north to Tamil in the south and Bengali in
the east to Gujarati in the west.

The
magazine’s aim in publishing fiction is to add, to the diverse points of view
published on its non-fiction pages, another way of looking at the world. But it
also means to set up for Indian fiction – a vast realm encompassing the work of
hundreds of writers, many of them unknown to one another, in several languages
– a site of evaluation and judgment independent of the biases of the literary
market. (These biases have in the West tended to open the door to a certain
type of writer who writes recognizably “Indian” novels, heavy on spices and
colours, patriarchs and premonitions.)

The
magazine’s literary pages seek a representation in fiction of the diversity of
meaning-making systems and high and low religious and political traditions that
so fascinate different kinds of people: both the first-time visitor to India,
and also the Indian who has never even left his or her country. But they
desire, too, the steps beyond such
highly aware mimesis. In literature, The
Caravan admires that fastidiously shaped language, that trick of narrative
technique, the use of ellipsis and of contrast, that gives fiction its
complexity, durability, and finally – in a journalistic age – its autonomy.

The
stories I have put together in this small anthology of Indian fiction for Internazionale include some published
recently in the pages of The Caravan,
as well as the work of other contemporaries of mine whom believe to be the
among the best and brightest voices in Indian literature today. I have tried to put together the most diverse
collection of styles I could find so as to make the point that the Indian
writer of fiction is first and foremost – and freest as – an Indian writer of fiction. That is, if he takes his
subject from what lies in front of him, he generates his style from a set of
influences that know no borders. Calvino may be more important to him or her
than Salman Rushdie; the realism of Giovanni Verga more useful in decoding the
minds of village folk than the work of the great Indian realists.

Two of
the stories included take full advantage of one of fiction’s greatest freedoms:
the capacity to rove widely across time and space, and to bring to narrative
life the silences that lie at the interstices of history. Kunal Basu’s “The
Accountant” begins with that most prosaic of figures, an accountant trapped in
a life of drudgery, and somehow makes him an actor the grand romance of the Taj
Mahal – and not the Taj as we know it today, but a yet-to-be-built Taj confined
to map and mind, the subject of palace intrigues, a site on a river-bank and
nothing more. Anushka Jasraj’s “Radio Story” takes the reader into the world of
the Indian independence movement, and a small plot by a Bombay clique – whether
more passionate about nationalism or radio-wave technology, we cannot tell – to
start a secret and dissident radio station.

There
are stories here about family, set in both urban and country landscapes. Janice
Pariat’s “Boats on Land” poetically describes a teenager’s sexual awakening on
a family vacation on a tea estate, and powerfully evokes the seductive power
and danger of the human body. Anjum Hasan’s artful montage “Saturday Night”,
about the parallel dilemmas (one about a baby that is absent, the other about a
baby that is somehow too present) of
a middle-class married couple and a maid in the southern metropolis of
Bangalore.

Phaniswarnath
Renu’s comic story “Panchlight” (the only story here to be doubly translated,
from Hindi to English and then from English to Italian) opens out for the
reader the hierarchical social world of castes in an Indian village. It is also
a parable of twentieth century India’s encounter, full of creative
misunderstandings and adaptations, with technology. In Renu’s story the warring
castes (and lovers) are eventually reconciled, but in the late Attia Hosain’s
“Storm” we encounter the dissident, rootless individual who appears from
nowhere and provokes the entire social order, so uncompromising it seems she is
alive only if she opposes. Of course it is fiction’s work to show us why, precisely
when life it at its most settled, some individuals must bring about a storm.

I chose
Aseem Kaul’s “Where Shall We Have Dinner Tonight?” for its exquisite minimalism
and its interrogation of dozens of short-story conventions (fiction must
question conventional thinking not just in human affairs, but also in fiction).
We are given no names or background for the characters, and there is no
narrator’s voice in the story: all we hear are two voices, and with each move
they grow in force.

And as
for my own story, “Captain To The Poles”, it is drawn from incidents from some
of the happiest years of my youth. These were days spent in a restaurant near
my small, decrepit flat in Mumbai, watching the world pass by (and through) the
restaurant, which was like a stationary caravan. The months passed in listening
to the patter of voices (the tall tales of the customers, the barbed
observations of the waiters) and serving as friend to the proprietor, confidant
to the staff, and taster of the menu. The restaurant was not just my School of
Life, it was – because it was intensely interested in stories, even if totally
uninvolved with books – also my School of Literature.

The award-winning translator of French literature Ros Schwartz is on a tour of India as part of a British Council-Caravan magazine series of events. She will give a talk at Hindu College at 2.30pm on Thursday, January 10, on the subject "The Translator As A Reader And As A Writer".

Schwartz will take different translations of passages from literature (including Pinocchio and The Little Prince) and break down their sentences, syntax, and word-choices, showing in how translation is really a kind of super-attentive reading, and one that requires a combination of rigorous thinking as well as leaps of imagination. This is a unique chance to learn something about the art and craft of translation from one of the world's most highly regarded literary translators.

Ros Schwartz is a translator of more than fifty books of French literature into English, including a recent translation of Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince. She is Chair of PEN's Writers in Translation Program in England.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

It would be hard for any reader now to keep up just with Indian novels, or books on Indian history, or Indian narrative non-fiction, let alone books from all these diverse fields. My list is no more than a small, very personal selection of the many high-quality new books published in India over the last two years.

To begin: novels. The two best Indian novels I read these past two years were Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke, the second book of his ambitious and widescale Ibis trilogy, and Jhootha Sach, the Hindi writer Yashpal's massive magnum opus set on either side of the Partition years and in cities -- Lahore and Delhi -- either side of the border that Partition would make impermeable. Ghosh's protagonist in River of Smoke -- and the focaliser of much of the narration -- Bahram Mody, a character absent in The Sea of Poppies, is one of the most memorable characters in Indian fiction, and the Bombay and Canton settings of the book are exquisitely laid out even as the polyphonic narrative voices and linguistic play of The Sea of Poppies are carried over. I read the book over three days at a Portuguese deli in London, and they remain bright in my memory as three of the best reading days of my life.

Yashpal's novel, on the other hand, was first published in 1958; its size -- over a thousand pages -- perhaps prevented it from arriving earlier into Indian fiction in English. For its Tolstoyan sweep and density of detail, its realism with regard to human nature and its idealism about the power of human aspirations, and its magisterial overview of the religious cataclysms in the Indian subcontinent in the nineteen-forties, this novel seems to me a plausible contender for the greatest of all Indian novels. It is one of those books that one lives as much as reads. It is translated by Yashpal's son, Anand, and appeared in the Penguin Classics series -- to my mind the most diverse and exciting publishing list in all of Indian literature today. Longer pieces on Ghosh and Yashpal are here and here, and you should also read the translator Daisy Rockwell's essay on Jhootha Sach, "Night-Smudged Light". Among other Indian novels, UR Ananthamurthy's Bharathipura (Oxford University Press) deserves to be read by anybody interested in Indian fiction as an interrogation of the deep structures of Indian social life.

In non-fiction, the two books by Indian writers that I enjoyed most couldn't have been written in more different styles, or had as their subject more disparate personalities: respectively a bar dancer in Bombay and an eighteenth-century Scottish natural philosopher. Sonia Faleiro's Beautiful Thing (Penguin/Grove), a book-length tracking of the rise, fall, and reinvention/suspension of Leela, a star of one of Bombay's dance bars, combined reportorial detachment and narrative empathy in just the right proportions. Faleiro's eye for detail is superior to almost any other Indian writer today, and her translations of Leela's talk into English initially appear patronising but only because they are so daring. Her work at the intersection of standard English and Indian English, or Indian English drawing on other languages, rivals the recent experiments in the same field by Ghosh and Vikram Chandra.

No human beings appear in the flesh in Kaushik Basu's Beyond The Invisible Hand: Groundwork for a New Economics (Princeton University Press and Penguin); there are only the intellectual ghosts of dead ones, particularly Adam Smith, whose ideas about the workings of markets and morality have been claimed and in many instances radically damaged by free-market thinkers of our time. But Basu has a wonderfully wry sense of humour, an eye for local examples for universal laws (such as the "ele bele phenomenon"), and an argumentative style so rigorous and yet unassuming -- consider the use of the word "groundwork" in his title -- that the three hundred or so pages of his book left me wanting much more. So I read it twice. The book is an elegant and unpartisan meditations on one of the great issues of our age: markets and their limits, and offers a roadway to rescuing free-market thinking from its more fanatical adherents. Chapter 1 of the book is here; you couldn't improve your brain more for an investment of Rs. 303. Basu's Twitter feed is consistently good reading too.

The scholar of religion Diana Eck's India: A Sacred Geography is a book that just can't be read without stopping -- only because so voluminous, rich, dense, and allusive -- and one which provides intellectual challenges and surprising connections from beginning to end. Its reading of Indian geography as a construct of the Hindu religious imagination before it was a secular cartographic map has a range that requires over five hundred pages to bring it out. “As arcane as lingas of light . . . and sacred rivers falling from heaven may seem to those who wish to get on with the real politics of today’s world,” Eck writes, “these very patterns of sanctification continue to anchor millions of people in the imagined landscape of their country.” a longer essay on her book is here.

I also found much to learn from about Bombay in Neera Adarkar's great anthology The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life (ImprintOne, longer essay here) and about the freedom struggle in Kashmir in Sanjay Kak's book Until My Freedom Has Come (longer essay here). Both these anthologies are primarily collections of essays by scholars and journalists, but neither Adarkar nor Kak are oblivious of the role of fiction in explaining the world and its dilemmas. The stories by the urban historian Prasad Shetty and the Kashmiri short-story writer Arif Ayaz Parrey are amongst the brightest lights in these books.

Short fiction. Anjum Hasan had already made a considerable reputation as a poet when she published her superb debut novel Lunatic In My Head in 2007, and last year she proved just as adept at the short-story form when she published her first collection, Difficult Pleasures(Penguin). Hasan brings a poet's startling perception and defamiliarizing eye to the observation of all her protagonists, as when the protagonist of "Banerjee and Banerjee", the economist Banerjee, is shown thinking -- entirely persuasively, if against the grain of the very story that is bringing him to life -- that "the crisscrossing of goods and services across the globe, created in hundreds of different environments and in response to countless human needs, is somehow a larger, better and more beautiful thing than any facts to do with individual lives."Another poet, Janice Pariat, established herself as a major new narrative voice -- lyrical, elliptical, and empathetic -- with Boats On Land(Random House India).

Gogu Shyamala's Father May Be An Elephant And Mother Only A Small Basket, But...(Navayana), rooted in the stories of Telangana in Andhra Pradesh and translated by several hands from the Telugu, impressed not only for the economy of Shyamala's style and the directness of the narration, but also because they take writing about Dalit protagonists beyond an older narrative binary of exploitation and suffering, enlarged and emaciated selfhood. Credit should also go to the publisher in working up a uniform and lucent English style for Shymala from translations by different hands.

Two works of fiction which had the words "Love Stories" in their titles were Annie Zaidi's Love Stories: #1 to 14 (HarperCollins) and Rajesh Parameswaran's debut collection I Am An Executioner: Love Stories(Knopf). Zaidi's work, taking one of fiction's most complex objects of inquiry head-on, was closely observed, multifaceted, and clearly thought through as a unity. "The One That Badly Wanted", about a girl who falls in love with a dead man, was a particular delight. Some of Parameswaran's stories indulged too heavily in the narrative hijinks that are a staple of the restless short fiction of our time, but his story about love in an alternative universe, “On the Banks of Table River (Planet Lucina, Andromeda Galaxy, AD 2319)”, was the most beautiful thing I read this year.

My poetic instincts are less sound than my prose ones and therefore my pursuit of new work in verse in India less secure, but over the last year I've dipped repeatedly into the bucking, slangy versions of Kabir produced by the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra in his ambitious Poems of Kabir (New York Review of Books/ Hachette) and the fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic Lalded's exquisitely elliptical and jagged ruminations on life, god and human relationships rendered into English by Ranjit Hoskote in I, Lalded(Penguin). These are books that will speak to readers just as powerfully in a hundred years as they do now. Hoskote's magisterial introduction to Lalded is also the best single piece of critical writing to have come my way in the last two years.

Last: literary criticism and intellectual history. So much work in the West on the Indian novel focusses on the best Indian writers in English -- Rushdie, Ghosh, Naipaul, Seth -- that this bias seeps back into Indian literature and Indian bookshops. So it was great to see a completely convincing case being made for the Oriya novelist Fakir Mohan Senapati being not just a writer that Indians should read but one that readers around the world should read by the contributors of Colonialism, Modernity and Literature(Palgrave Macmillan/ Orient Longman), edited by Satya P. Mohanty, one of Senapati's translators. A conclave of Indian and American literary critics show that Senapati's riddling humour, circling and subversive point of view, and throughly original narrative technique make his novel Six Acres and a Third one of the greatest and most durable of Indian novels, one that, as the critic Himansu Mohapatra memorably writes, "reveals the causal joints of the world." All novelists desire to earn this compliment.

And finally, the intellectual historian DR Nagaraj, who passed away tragically early while still in his forties, left behind an astoundingly diverse body of work -- and a carefully sculpted point of view -- about Indian society, native traditions, Kannada epics and novels and literary criticism, communal violence, and the tension between Gandhian and Ambedkarite thought. Although sometimes prolix and orotund, Nagaraj's prose is also marked by fantastic metaphorical leaps and fine-grained reading of texts. The white heat of Listening to the Loom (Permanent Black), a posthumous collection of Nagaraj's essays put together by his student Prithvi Chandra Datta Shobhi, kept me up many nights in July. “If the methods and philosophical positions of present times are fit and useful to analyse the formulations of several kinds of pre-modern eras," writes Nagaraj, "the reverse should also be true.” His book is that pathway that runs back into the mists of time.

Marriage and economics have never been independent of one another. The relationship between the two in the affairs of men and women is memorably dramatized in this story by Narendranath Mitra, one of Bengal’s greatest short-story writers. And the narrative time of the story and the arc of the romances within it are marked, too, by the cycle of the seasons in a rural economy, as seen through the life of the protagonist, Motalef, a tapper of palm-trees. The “ras” of Mitra’s story is not just the juice of the palm trees which give Motalef his livelihood, but also the “ras” of human passion, that longing to possess what is beautiful that maddens human beings and leads them to singe the lives of those around them. In order that he may accumulate the bride-price to marry for love, Motalef can see no other way out than to marry first for wealth; within this marriage, he enjoys a devotion and companionship that he later spurns for the lure of youth and beauty. Mitra’s story has an irresistible force and amplitude, but perhaps it is never more beautiful than in the long interlude between the two winters, or palm-tree seasons, covered by the events of the tale. Here, Motalef is seen pampering his pretty new wife and burning himself out over numerous unremunerative tasks, waiting for the next high season to come along and his labours to yield riches again through the transformation of palm-tree syrup into jaggery by his wife’s hand. Mitra fills his story with symbols and metaphors rooted in the world that it describes; when, in the closing scenes, Motalef comes to a realisation of how he has been trumped by his own scheming, the two pots of ras he takes on a final journey stand unforgettably for his defeat as they once stood for his triumph. “Ras” was memorably adapted to film by Sudhendu Roy in 1973 called Saudagar, starring Amitabh Bachchan, Nutan, and Padma Khanna.

The poems of Anupama Raju enact a world of metamorphoses and secrets, and their movement is continually toward a blurring and breaking down of walls and boundaries, whether physical or conceptual ones. In poems like ‘The Memory Maker’, every line throbs with the forces of shape-shifting; as soon as one transformation has been absorbed, we are catapulted into the space of another. One of her poems here is called ‘The Time-Eater’, and its most memorable image, coiled into the final pair of lines, is that of the human being and time feeding off one another before the stronger side wins the battle. But Raju’s taut, aphoristic style shows us how a poem, too, might be thought to be a kind of time-eater, working nimbly with syntax, rhythm and space to deliver concentrated effects in small shots of time.‘Nightless Night’ and ‘The Memory Maker’ are from ‘Une Ville Un Lieu Une Personne’, a poetry-photography collaboration between Raju and the French photographer Pascal Bernard.

The Fiction & Poetry page for The Caravan is here. If you'd like to submit original, unpublished work to The Caravan, (short stories no more than 5000 words long, or five or six poems) please email me at chandrahas.choudhury@gmail.com.

Friday, October 19, 2012

Last week the Chinese novelist Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Here is an old post from 2005 on his work: "Lush Life in Mo Yan".

And here are some sentences from a review of his novel Change that I wrote in 2010: "Mo Yan loves to play off communism’s vision of order, selflessness, discipline and ideological unanimity against its almost inevitable worldly expression as hierarchy, chaos, corruption and greed. Communism, in a way, is the enabling fiction of his own fiction."

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

For the last month I've had the pleasure of living and working in the small village of Hoechon in South Korea, about three hours from Seoul, at the Toji Foundation for Culture, a center for Korean and foreign artists set up by the great Korean novelist Pak Kyung-ni (1926-2008).

The center takes its name from Pak Kyung-ni's greatest work, a sixteen-volume novel sequence, written between the years 1969-1994, called Toji or Land. Every year it hosts residencies for a diverse group of Korean artists, and an annual residency sponsored by Sangam House, the Inko Centre, India, and the Arts Council, Korea, makes it possible for an Indian writer to join them. Indian writers who've come to Toji before me include the fiction writer Mridula Koshy and the playwright Manav Kaul.

Here at Toji I've been working on my new novel, wandering around the countryside and making occasional trips to the nearest town, Wonju, reading some Korean literature, and eating, drinking, talking, and playing ping-pong with a band of very sociable Korean writers, filmmakers, musicians and painters. The Foundation is set down in an uncommonly beautiful scene, ringed by tall pine-covered mountains that change colour in the varying light of the day and become obscured by clouds when it rains. All around us are lush fields of wild sesame, chilli, and corn, as well as apple and persimmon trees, and sudden surges of white, pink and red cosmos flowers.

Dawn and dusk are especially beautiful, and as I walk on streets so empty that my passing often sets off an entire alarm-chorus of village dogs, whose barks, echoing off the mountains, give an air of extreme criminality to my small trespasses. There's great pleasure to be had in the sight of these mountains, their undulating shape matched on the ground by the roofs, uptilted at the edges like birds' wings, native to Korean architecture. While I contemplate my material and work out its moments of emphasis and stillness, I hear in my mind's ear the captivating sound, at once familiar and strange, of the Korean instruments -- the stringed gayageum, the flute-like piri, and the booming changu drums -- that I heard on my first weekend here, when I was taken by my hosts in Seoul to an exquisite musical, Miso.

At weekend gatherings of the writers and artists on the program to drink the Korean liquors makkoli and soju, I have had to contribute my small repertoire of Oriya folk songs as a complement to their Korean ditties. Meanwhile, I've tried to develop a working Korean vocabulary word by word, with the English-speaking Korean writers having to serve as go-betweens for my more complex sentiments. Since what small merits there may be to my prose style are remote to my companions, my main stratagem for winning their respect has been my topspin forehand at the table-tennis table and my Korean pronunciation at the dinner table; in turn, they are patiently teaching me how to eat with chopsticks in the correct manner, at once direct and delicate.

Meanwhile, I've also been trying to read some Korean literature in English translation, about which I knew very little when I arrived: mainly the excellent translations of a number of Korean poets by Brother Anthony of Taize, among them some by the poet Kim Sa-in that I had the pleasure to publish in The Caravan earlier this year. Here I've also become acquainted with other translations by Kevin O'Rourke, a long-time student of Korean literature, Don Mee Choi, and Bruce Fulton. I've also been able to lay my hands on the three large volumes of Pak Kyung-ni's Land that are currently available in an English translation by Agnita Tennant. The novel is set between the years 1897 and 1945, and is imagined on a scale that dwarfs most of the sprawling realist novels of the world whose narrative techniques it adapts: it runs to 25 volumes, and has over a hundred prominent characters. Tennant writes in her introduction:

Land has been acclaimed as the most powerful and important work in modern Korean literature. While it is the greatest national novel, it has at the same time a universal appeal as it deals with fundamental, borderless and timeless themes of humanity such as love, treachery, the gap between the rich and the poor, fate, and deep-rooted traditions facing the tide of change.

The novel begins in 1897 on a night of the calendar of great significance in Korea: Chuseok (literally "autumn night") a harvest festival held on the full moon day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar. The festival is one of joy, abundance, plenty to eat and drink, and the scenes that unfold before us are marked by this mood. But shortly afterwards, a dissenting note is inserted into the story by the narrator, who sees that times when joy is an obligation and man for a moment feels wealthy are precisely the times when old sorrows spring up most powerfully:

The Harvest Moon Festival of the eighth lunar month -- doesn't it have something of the translucent and frosty pathos of the finest hemp? How can a festival associated with the moon, which crosses the river of darkness like a shadow of death, be regarded as a symbol of abundance? As it hangs coolly over the ridge of the mountain the twigs of trees cast lacy shadows and a young widow clad in white silk walks the night road alone. Isn't the harvest moon of the eighth month perhaps a festival that celebrates the closing of a sorrowful life, revealing the art of renunciation to all living things, and especially to the poor. [...]
This is when they reflect on their many separations: elderly parents who perished in years of bad harvest, unable to keep alive on grass roots and bark; children in epidemics, left to die without medication, rolled up in a straw mat and buried in the nearby hills; a husband during the uprising dragged into the governor's house and beaten to a resentful death; and those many neighbours now asleep underneath the earth. The breeze plays gently on the strings of these sorrowful memories.
"Perhaps they are better off in the other world?"

My visits to Pak Kyung-ni's former residence in the nearby town of Wonju and to a museum that houses her manuscripts, books, and pictures from her life, as well as what I've been able to read here about what writing meant to her, left me with a sense of someone absolutely and enviably committed to literature, and who took great pleasure in work and in creation. In an essay written late in her life called "The Dangerous Power of the Material", she writes:

I think that being alive -- life -- is the most beautiful thing of all. And it is this thought now that is most dear to me. [...] It's not just human life -- flowers or animals, all that lives is beautiful. The reason why life is beautiful is because it is active. Isn't that what life is? That which acts? The world is full of material things. But all of these are passive. To be a thing is to be passive. To live is to be active.

I leave Toji this weekend -- incidentally the weekend of Chuseok -- to go back home to Delhi with many happy memories, and closer both to my own work and Korean life and literature.

Friday, July 20, 2012

This month, The Caravan publishes "No-Arms", a story by the Russian writer Andrey Platonov.

Platonov (1899-1951) is now considered by many to be the greatest Russian writer of the 20th century. Like Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the other, better-known names who might also be thought worthy of that title, Platonov was someone who for a time believed in the ideals of the Russian Revolution and the Communist Party before commencing a sceptical examination of the new reality it birthed, often by violence, in Russia. The individual and often mystifying emphases of his work and his utterly distinctive (and therefore unassimilable) style made it difficult for him to publish. Though Platonov published a number of great short stories during his lifetime, most of his longer works, along with his plays and screenplays, were published only long after his death. In his last years, he wrote a series of stories based on Russian folktales, infusing the material of these fairly well known stories with the spirit of his own metaphysics.

In this tremendously powerful and wrenching story about a woman whose arms are cut off by her own brother, Platonov shows us both the ubiquity of human evil and the persistence of human grace in situations of extreme suffering. Although the story preserves the folktale’s clear distinctions between good and evil people, it is very complex in its understanding of guilt, redemption and justice. The recognition scene in which sundered lovers are reunited will remind Indian readers of a similar scene in Kalidasa’sShakuntalam, while the final act of violence (and the unforgettable image of a horse returning from the steppe) recalls Oedipus’s self-blinding when he finally perceives all the evil that has passed through him.

An interview with Platonov's main translator, Robert Chandler, is here.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

A glimpse at the list of winners of the
Nobel Prize in Literature in the last decade shows that the Swedish committee
that adjudicates the prize is often willing to honour highly feted, widely
read, and hotly tipped writers who for years have had “Nobel Prize” tagged to
their names. VS Naipaul is one such case, and so are JM Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk and Mario Vargas Llosa.

But just as often the committee throws up a
name that the vast majority of readers have never heard of, and to my mind this
is the more interesting, exploratory side of its work. Who had heard of the
Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz or the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek before
they won the award in 2002 and 2004 respectively? Who indeed, at least in the
Anglophone world, could claim at the time of announcement to have read anything
by the 2008 winner, the Frenchman Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio? What the committee is saying, in effect, is that great literature, always being the work of an individual mind, can come from all kinds of unlikely places. Prizes like the Nobel can be a way of equalizing the iniquities of the literary market and the entrenched power of certain languages and cultures in the world today.

Le Clézio (many of whose works are now available
once again in English translation after being out of print for some three
decades), is an especially difficult writer to slot because, in addition to the
difficulty and often wilful obscurity of his work, there is the difficulty and
obscurity of his biography. Although he was born in France, and writes in
French, he also claims allegiance to Mauritius, where one side of his family
comes from, and where he still lives part of the year.

A restless wanderer from
the days of his youth, he seems not to have needed a “home” for his work, not
to have cultivated a relationship with a single place or culture as most
novelists do. Indeed, his itinerancy – he has spent time in and written books
set in Mauritius, France, Mexico, Panama, and Africa, a world writer if there
ever was one – might seem to resemble that of Naipaul, except that he mostly
writes fiction, and his work is much more sympathetic to the marginalised
people and cultures who are his subjects than Naipaul, with his glowering eye,
is.

Among the distinctive emphases of Le Clézio’s
writing is his engagement with what he has called cultures “broken by the
modern world” – all the tribes and peoples thrown out of joint by the encounter
with colonialism, Western rationalism, and the power of the nation-state (a
good parallel in an Indian context might be someone like Mahasweta Devi or
Gopinath Mohanty, both of whom have written extensively about the problems of
Indian tribals). This willingness to move across a boundary, to invert a
dominant power relationship, and to imagine the life of the “other”
sympathetically from within is best seen in Le Clézio’s work in his novel Desert(1980), one the
central novels in his oeuvre and now translated into English for the first time
by C. Dickson.

Set in Morocco and in France, and spanning a century
in time, Desert is the story of a
warrior tribe of the desert, called “the blue men”, and their flight from
French occupying forces in the early part of the twentieth century. Le Clézio
depicts a group of people ceaselessly making their way forward like ants in the
vast, arid and spirit-breaking desert, seeking a place of refuge where they can
consolidate their resources and turn once again towards the lost homeland. In
counterpoint, Le Clézio also tells the story, set in the present day, of a girl
from the same tribe, Lalla, who flees the desert to escape a marriage she does
not want and arrives in France, a vulnerable immigrant.

A great traveller himself, Le Clézio here produces a
very close and painstaking description of human beings on the move across a
landscape. His attention to the constantly shifting and turning shapes of the
universe – no other novelist spends as much time detailing the changing colours
of the sky, or the particularities of the light – turns his story into a cosmic
drama. Le Clézio is also one of those writers who work absolutely on their own
terms. His book is slow-moving and often difficult going, but the writing is frequently
beautiful and alert, as when he speaks of the wind that “draws the yellow
grasses aside like a hand passing over them”, or hears “the faint swish of sand
running down the grooves in the rocks” on a cliff. If you consider yourself an
ambitious reader, there’s no reason to deny yourself an encounter with this
very independent-minded and distinctive sensibility.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Books, the great American essayist and
cultural critic Susan Sontag writes, “are a way of being fully human”. This is a point of view that this site is of course very sympathetic to. Without books,
we are more likely to be without history, without memory, without imagination,
without good language, without that kind of skepticism or doubt that stimulates
reflection and an appreciation of complexity. Books expand inwardness: the
experience of them, in a hyperkinetic age full of carefully plotted and speeded-up
stimuli, is tantamount to a kind of meditation. Before there is a book, there
must be a reader – a mind that has the space in it for the experience of
extended connection with a book.

“By books, I mean the conditions of reading
that made possible literature and its soul effects,” Sontag writes in an essay,
wondering if books will survive the assault of our “advertising-driven
televisual reality”. Here, undoubtedly, is a combative and
adversarial thinker with a very high-minded view of reading. But as the pieces
in Sontag’s final collection of essays, WhereThe Stress Falls, demonstrate, the truly remarkable thing about Sontag
(1933-2004) was not so much the gravity of her pronouncements as the range and
catholicity of her interests.

Where The
Stress Falls contains essays on books, films, music, dance, art, photography,
each one of them a felicitous combination of close interpretation of particular
works and larger arguments about the history of the medium itself. This high
view of multiple art-forms informs all of Sontag’s work, generating rapid
cross-connections (“As the statue is entombed in he block of marble, the novel
is inside your head. You try to liberate it.”) Like all the great critics,
Sontag brought to her work a combination of perspicacity and personality: the
erudition of a trained and subtle mind applying itself to a careful observation
of its own highly individual reactions to art, and able to reproduce its
journeys in lithe, allusive prose.

Among the forty or so essays collected
here, surely the most widely circulated and discussed was Sontag’s essay from
1996, “A Century of Cinema”. For Sontag cinema was the greatest contribution of
the twentieth century to the corpus of human art-forms, a form rooted first and
foremost in a wonder “that reality can be transcribed with such magical
immediacy”. There was something total about the cinematic experience. “Lovers
of poetry or opera or dance don’t think
there is only poetry or opera or
dance,” she writes. “But lovers of cinema could think there was only cinema.”

But much as Sontag’s essay was a reprisal
and a stock-taking of where the movies had gone over a hundred years, there was
also something deeply elegiac and pessimistic about it. For Sontag, the nineteen-sixties
and seventies represented the peak of what she termed “cinephilia” – a highly
informed, highly personal love of the movies held by a substantial number of
aficionados committed not just to films but to film-watching in a darkened
theatre, so that they might be overwhelmed “by the physical presence of the
image”.

But over time this cine-system had been
broken down, on the supply side, by the cynical formulae and simplifications of
capitalist production, which had eliminated the tension between cinema as
industry and cinema as art, and on the reception side, by the sheer
proliferation of images in the modern world and the expansion of private home
viewing. “The reduction of cinema to assaultive images,” Sontag writes, “and
the unprincipled manipulation of images (faster and faster cutting) to be more
attention-grabbing, have produced a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that
doesn’t demand anyone’s full attention.” These observations could profitably be applied
to the story of Indian own popular cinema.

Perhaps the first skill of the good
literary critic is knowing how to quote – that is, knowing how to supply the
part that will rouse in the reader a need for the whole. Attention, in words,
to a work of verbal art involves stepping back at times and letting the work
speak for itself. This becomes especially important if the essay is an argument
for the beauty of a novel or poem or play few have ever heard of, for then it
is the excerpt that persuades as much as the analysis. Sontag was an especially
adept practitioner of quoting, and there are wonderful passages here from the
work of such masters as WG Sebald, Witold Gombrowicz, and Adam Zagajewski. Where The Stress Falls is not just
eloquent invitation to the pleasures of reading, of watching, of inwardness, but
itself an incarnation of some of these pleasures.

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About Me

I am the author of the novel Arzee the Dwarf, (HarperCollins, 2009; New York Review Books 2013), and the editor of the anthology of Indian fiction India: A Traveler's Literary Companion (Whereabouts Press, 2010; HarperCollins India 2011). I am also the Fiction & Poetry editor of the Indian magazine of politics and the arts The Caravan.

My books: Arzee the Dwarf

Named one of "60 Essential Works of Modern Indian literature in English" by World Literature Today. Shortlisted for the Commonwealth First Book Award 2010. Published in German (DTV) and Spanish (Plataforma) translations in 2012